So I guess everybody (at least those of you living in the EU) should have heard by now. If not, you are either living under a rock, or rely on the mainstream media to inform over the important things too aside from the latest soccer match results (surprise, they don't).

So for those of you, that don't know yet: The EU tries their hands at a reform of the copyright. Sounds cool? I think so too, except it isn't. There are a few nice things in there, like freeing AI research from copyright restrictions on data mining and some other things. But there are two killer paragraphs:

1. Article 11 aka link tax
2. Article 13 aka upload filter

Now I won't go too deep with article 11, all I can say is, that it was tried in Germany and Spain already and it was proven to be shit.

Article 13 however is a whole different story. Article 13 was the main reason, the proposed copyright directive was rejected by the European Parliament last year because it stated clearly: In order to not be responsible for the content their users upload, platforms shall employ upload filters. While the majority wasn't overwhelming, more than half of our politicians recognized upload filters to be a huge thread for freedom of speech and the internet as a whole and thus voted against them.

No problem is what our EU commission must have thought. They just went and removed the word upload filter from their text, hoping to fool the parliament. It's just, just because the word upload filter isn't used anymore, it doesn't mean, the platforms will get away without them. They still must prevent users from uploading copyright protected content. It should be obvious, that that is only possible with upload filters.


The protest: Naturally people see that thing as what it is and started voicing their discontent. Almost 5 mio people by now have signed a petition against article 13. Thousands have written emails to their MEPs (member of the European Parliament). The politicians reaction? "Bots." They don't even think we are real people.

I could write on and on about that, but you could just as well google a little bit. I'll also put some links down below.

What is your opinion? Feel free to discuss, this is a forum after all.
But over all else, if you are like me and over 4 mio other people out there and are against article 13, help preventing it. In the last week of March the EU parliament is going to decide either rejecting the copyright directive or approving it and bringing us one of the stupidest laws the world has ever seen.
On the 23rd of March EU wide demos are planned. Join them. If we are enough people, the politicians can't ignore us anymore. You can get more information here: https://savetheinternet.info/demos
Also you can sign the petition here: https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-stop-the-censorship-machinery-save-the-internet
You can also write your MEPs an email or call them or even visit them, though I'm too lazy, to post some links to that here.

#SaveTheInternet #SaveYourInternet #stopACTA2 #Op13 #SaveYourFreedom #UploadFilter #LinkTax #Filternet #article13 #article11 #CopyrightDirective #bots

And here the links:
https://savetheinternet.info/

https://saveyourinternet.eu/

https://www.stopacta2.org/

https://juliareda.eu/eu-copyright-reform/

The whole legal text: https://juliareda.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Copyright_Final_compromise.pdf

Also some links to content by people approving article 13:
Umm, it can't be that hard to find, I mean seriously? I know of at least two German sites, but I can't find even them again ...
Edit: Yay, I found a (german) article approving article 13: https://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article189986987/Artikel-13-Das-Urheberrecht-sorgt-fuer-mehr-Gerechtigkeit.html
Now if anybody could find something in that article, that sounds reasonable, please say so. Cause I could not.
Edit2: There's even a campaign website promoting article 13: https://www.article13.org/ But they are still linking versions of the copyright directive from last year, and we can't debate over a law, with a version, that isn't even up-to-date.

So yeah, any additions to the links would be welcome too.

Almost forgot, most important point: Is osu! gonna be affected? The osu! staff, who could actually bring some light to this, seem to apply a wait and see approach, so no response from them yet. From my analysis I can only conclude: Most likely. If osu! doesn't somehow get out of it with not being an EU company, than I don't see, how the directive could not apply to osu!. And I mean, if it's that easy, YouTube could just close it's branch offices in the EU and be out of it too.

At this point, the "save the internet" game plan should be for the rest of the world to create a reverse walled garden around Europe and let them have the little information quarantine hellscape they've been dreaming of. That'd be more likely than any european member states or constituents having any say on what the imperial fourth reich overlords in brussels decide to do.

the rest of the world doesn't have to suffer just because most of europe went with the unbelievably bad decision to surrender sovereignty to a foreign oligarchy without firing a single shot.

If you're a european, sorry to say your only real push back against this is to encourage your domestic government representatives to trigger article 50 before it's too late and that gets stripped away too around the time the millions of migrants that just happen by sheer coincidence I'm sure to consist mostly of fighting age, unemployed males (that also don't have any nationalistic loyalties on the continent that would make them reluctant to harm europeans) get drafted into a european union army.

I'm american though so take this all with a grain of salt.

Yeah article 50, the "brexit". I only ever thought how stupid that is, but now I think best decision ever. I would encourage a dexit (or gexit), but that stupid copyright reform was mostly encouraged by german politicians.

So how about encouraging a dexit, then moving to another EU country and save the internet from there? Should be easier ...

By the way, I propably wouldn't care either, if I wasn't living here. I mean it's not like I care about the Chinese firewall or the USA having lost their internet neutrality. But this time it is my internet they are threatening so I'm gonna be as loud as I can.

European internet policies actually have sweeping impacts overseas, we're already seeing a lot of changes about how our silicon valley hegemony is handling data and terms of service for all users, all due to europe. I think there has to be a breaking point where we just say "enough", though. And this might be it. The sheer amount of money and resources and alienation of userbases it's going to take to conform to article 13 might actually make continued business in europe more of a drain than profitable, if that's the case hoo boy eu gonna have an egg on its face when most of the services their citizens use pull the rug out from under them and they can't do anything about it.

You will still have the option of using vpn's, of course. Funny would be if the silicon valley hegemony started a campaign to get vpn's into the hands of european citizens so they can access the websites still without european union policy being able to apply to anything. A sort of cyber space (literal) proxy war of liberation.

That'd be funny, and at this point it wouldn't surprise me. We are at a point in the US where privatized censorship has become so bad that Gab was compelled to make a third party commenting addon called Dissenter that reads the site url you're on and gives you an appropriate external forum where you can comment freely on the page, completely separate from the reach of the website you're commenting about. The absolute state of the internet right now is absurd.

"The absolute state of the internet right now is absurd." That's totally true.

YouTube and other services terminating their operating within the EU is kind of the worst case scenario, that's being pictured by the critics. Actually that wouldn't be so bad, because it should show even the dumbest people, what's going on here. But I don't think, that EU's population is so little, that operating a monopol video platform wouldn't be worth it. Since there are no rivals on the market, they can just put as much advertisments as they want, and those they can sell how ever expensive they want, because nobody else would be able to create their own upload filters. Kinda how Microsoft for example sells an edited version of Windows in China and they have their own messenger, Payment system and whatnot.

Wait, is that the goal of the EU? Driving of all american companies, so that they than can make people use their own? If that's the case, I feel they didn't think this through.

Edit:
I can't believe it! To preempt the announced demos on 23.03. they now try to prepone the voting to next week. I can't even express how upset I'm about that. That's no democracy they are trying to do there! That's ignoring their citizens with every way possible.

NOTHING, and I mean nothing will happens until the millions who signed the petition enclose the EU parliament. Don't hold your breath, the article 13 will be implemented. Time to move to asia...

burakku wrote:

Time to move to asia...

yes article 13 sucks and do something as long as you can but... as for the worst case scenario: what are they gonna do? with the upload filters it'd probably be like the content id system, just that stuff gets banhammered instantly. now.. youtube & co would be pretty stupid if they just banned it for the whole world, i mean just europe would be getting article 13, right? so they'll ban it for whole europe. so worst case scenario: you get a proxy and go on with what you've been doing so far. if you don't get a paid proxy / vpn then you'll experience a very slow internet but other than that yeah.

mulraf wrote:

burakku wrote:

Time to move to asia...

yes article 13 sucks and do something as long as you can but... as for the worst case scenario: what are they gonna do? with the upload filters it'd probably be like the content id system, just that stuff gets banhammered instantly. now.. youtube & co would be pretty stupid if they just banned it for the whole world, i mean just europe would be getting article 13, right? so they'll ban it for whole europe. so worst case scenario: you get a proxy and go on with what you've been doing so far. if you don't get a paid proxy / vpn then you'll experience a very slow internet but other than that yeah.

Axel Voss wrote:

When asked whether filters will be sufficient to keep Youtube users from infringing copyright, Voss said, "If the platform's intention is to give people access to copyrighted works, then we have to think about whether that kind of business should exist." That is, if Article 13 makes it impossible to have an online platform where the public is allowed to make work available without first having to submit it to legal review, maybe there should just no longer be anywhere for the public to make works available.

I think you underestimate just how fascist and orwellian this is going to get.

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/13/youtube-killer.html

Invoke article 50. Seriously do it now.

Article 50? What is that article about?

Nigrod wrote:

Article 50? What is that article about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_the_European_Union

Woah, few days to the demo and suddenly this thread gets active (Was already worrying, that the only one appearing was american, who should not have to care as much as we Europeans)

burakku wrote:

NOTHING, and I mean nothing will happens until the millions who signed the petition enclose the EU parliament. Don't hold your breath, the article 13 will be implemented. Time to move to asia...

I wouldn't lose hopes just yet. Actually I already got the feeling, that with by now everybody admitting, that upload filters will be necessary, and nobody being able to admit, that they want upload filters (cause the media would kill them), §13 was as good as bye-bye. Only then I read, that Axel Voss is still optimistic. Now that doesn't count for much, because that guy clearly lost all relation to reality but tomorrow is still a good opportunity to show the politicians our opinion about their clearly outdated ways to approach internet related things.

mulraf wrote:

burakku wrote:

Time to move to asia...

yes article 13 sucks and do something as long as you can but... as for the worst case scenario: what are they gonna do? with the upload filters it'd probably be like the content id system, just that stuff gets banhammered instantly. now.. youtube & co would be pretty stupid if they just banned it for the whole world, i mean just europe would be getting article 13, right? so they'll ban it for whole europe. so worst case scenario: you get a proxy and go on with what you've been doing so far. if you don't get a paid proxy / vpn then you'll experience a very slow internet but other than that yeah.

Not everybody knows how to use vpn and with that §13 will effectively kill most part of European internet communities. Now that won't hit people like us as strongly, because we both now our way around in technical things and we both are probably not that much bound to pure European communities and won't mind using only american and Japanese sites. But I'd still like not doing something illegal just by using the internet (usually sites forbid you from using vpn and will ban you if they notice you do, too) and I'd like to talk with people I know irl about the internet and don't want to let using a small discussion forum become as strange and not talked about as watching anime.
Plus: Who knows, they already try forbidding the Dark Net, next thing will be vpns. Because you know, only people doing illegal stuff are using vpns. (Sad thing is, this time that wouldn't even be that far off, only that few people would consider using the internet as we do today illegal.)

For anyone that is curious how the proposal actually looks like: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35373/st09134-en18.pdf (pages 56 to 59)

abraker wrote:

For anyone that is curious how the proposal actually looks like: http://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/35373/st09134-en18.pdf (pages 56 to 59)

tl;dr, but disclaimer first: I may have misinterpreted things so take the tl;dr with a grain of salt. I did try my best to understand it and have no idea what I am doing

paragraph 1: Content providers can't use copyrighted works without permission from copyright holder
paragraph 2: N/A
paragraph 3: Content providers are responsible for what content gets upload
paragraph 4: Content providers are not responsible for what content gets uploaded if they have no permission for that content and has made its "best efforts" to rid of it
paragraph 5: What is "best efforts" depends on company's size, its resource it has, and the amount of uploaded shit it has to manage
paragraph 6: Content providers, upon request by those who upload, must be able to say how their "best efforts" work to get rid of unwanted content
paragraph 7: Content providers cannot be biased on the content they remove; they should also have a channel for disputes
paragraph 8: Content providers should have and provide documentation on how effective their mechanisms for handling unwanted content are considering their resources and work with stakeholders to strive to create better mechanisms for handling unwanted content.

Paragraph 3,4, and 5 together is where the apocalyptic stuff is at. Tho who ever came up with paragraph 5 must have been smoking some serious shit. Wtf is even with it:

The measures referred to in point (a) of paragraph 4 shall be effective and proportionate, taking into account, among other factors:

(a) the nature and size of the services, in particular whether they are provided by a microenterprise or a small-sized enterprise within the meaning of Title I of the Annex to Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC, and their audience;

(b) the amount and the type of works or other subject matter uploaded by the users of the services;

(c) the availability and costs of the measures as well as their effectiveness in light of technological developments in line with the industry best practice referred to in paragraph 8.

It's so vague. Doesn't even define how big a company should be or how much content it should be going through to consider it has made "best efforts".

Oh, they actually changed it since the "leaked" version by Julia Reda (linked it in the first post). They took out some of the obvious nonsense (in that old version paragraph 4 of article 13 had a third point "made best efforts to obtain an authorisation", which is extremely vague, no matter how you look at it).

As I see it, point 8 is about building a forum (consisting of politicians, right-holders and online content sharing providers), in which best practices for upload filters shall be discussed. This should also clarify point 5. With that they take out my biggest criticism: Every platform older than 3 years being liable to the same extent.

Overall they actually managed, to put what they want into text. That is a lot better compared to before, if you ask me. Still criticism remains: They are (extremely) endangering freedom of speech to enforce copyright and there is no way to predict, how point 5 together with point 8 will work out.

Also there seem to be some big misunderstandings about what the current state of the art is. Promoters seem to think, that the youtube content id system is a working prove of working upload filters (come on, who has actually seen that thing at work and can still say, that it works as it should and reliable?). Also the possibility to search for memes on Google Pictures seems to convince some people, that that happens over filters (instead of standard search in accompanying text as how it's actually happening).

lm2578 wrote:

Not everybody knows how to use vpn and with that §13 will effectively kill most part of European internet communities. Now that won't hit people like us as strongly, because we both now our way around in technical things and we both are probably not that much bound to pure European communities and won't mind using only american and Japanese sites. But I'd still like not doing something illegal just by using the internet (usually sites forbid you from using vpn and will ban you if they notice you do, too) and I'd like to talk with people I know irl about the internet and don't want to let using a small discussion forum become as strange and not talked about as watching anime.
Plus: Who knows, they already try forbidding the Dark Net, next thing will be vpns. Because you know, only people doing illegal stuff are using vpns. (Sad thing is, this time that wouldn't even be that far off, only that few people would consider using the internet as we do today illegal.)

i totally know what you mean, of course i don't want this to happen too. i think that this is also a strong counter-argument - if article 13 comes out it will not be a stricter room for our rights but instead more people would flee to things like the dark net. and the eu definitely doesn't want that to happen.
i mostly put this out so that people know what to consider doing next IF things come to the worst.

[und kurz da du deutsch bist: früher hatten wir das ja mit der gema. da gabs auch den "youtube unblocker" oder so der das automatisch dann bei youtube über einen proxy umgangen hat als add-on für firefox etc. das ging auch für laien total leicht. wette sowas würde es dann wieder geben]

but yeah, go out onto the streets and protest, send messages to your representatives, try to prevent the worst case to happen.

Thanks to everyone participating in the demonstrations yesterday (I'm not an organizer but still.)

Here's an article about the protests:
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/23/artikel-13.html

lm2578 wrote:

Thanks to everyone participating in the demonstrations yesterday (I'm not an organizer but still.)

Here's an article about the protests:
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/23/artikel-13.html

I doubt Brussels cares about the rabble, but it's good to see anyway I guess.

ayy

Vuelo Eluko wrote:

lm2578 wrote:

Thanks to everyone participating in the demonstrations yesterday (I'm not an organizer but still.)

Here's an article about the protests:
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/23/artikel-13.html

I doubt Brussels cares about the rabble, but it's good to see anyway I guess.

I hate to believe it, but I guess you were right. The EU parliament voted in favor of the Copyright Reform and with that in favor of link tax and upload filters.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/eu-article-13-vote-article-17

Now the EU member states will have 2 years to put that in national law. That means: 2 years entertainment until the internet dies. "Always look at the bright sight of life."

lm2578 wrote:

Vuelo Eluko wrote:

lm2578 wrote:

Thanks to everyone participating in the demonstrations yesterday (I'm not an organizer but still.)

Here's an article about the protests:
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/23/artikel-13.html

I doubt Brussels cares about the rabble, but it's good to see anyway I guess.

I hate to believe it, but I guess you were right. The EU parliament voted in favor of the Copyright Reform and with that in favor of link tax and upload filters.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/eu-article-13-vote-article-17

Now the EU member states will have 2 years to put that in national law. That means: 2 years entertainment until the internet dies. "Always look at the bright sight of life."

Tyranny will do as tyranny is.

how brittle you think is the EU?

will Article 13 make people want out?

we have been fucked bois.

they let article 13/17 pass.

in the next 2 years, the eu will be fucked, most of the internet will be, too.

10/10 meme, in fact even 7.8/10 ign too much copyright.

abraker wrote:

how brittle you think is the EU?

will Article 13 make people want out?

Seeing how the UK is doing, that isn't likely. For most European countries, there isn't really a viable alternative as of yet, so although Article 13 will be a hard pill to swallow, I doubt the anger it'll cause will rally enough people to dissolve the union. If we're lucky though, it might cause enough uproar to reform the union to a certain degree, hopefully transferring some of the power over to citizens, rather than remaining an obscured oligarchy.

In my opinion europe is done at this point, the politicians are corrupt, our countries are filled with third world people which don't fit the european lifestyle and ethics and our economies are going for the worst.In about 40 years i think my country will disappear and if it doesn't it's just going to be a place full of pakistanis, iraqis and other middle east countries people.Yes i know i sound racist but i talk like that because my ethnicity and my country's future is doomed in the hands of such people.Same goes for all europe now that the bureaucrats have decided to destroy our countries for the trade of low labor.As stated above it's time for the people that are not NPCs to move out of europe and find a nice peaceful place to live and prosper because we ,the europeans, are good people. Don't let anybody else tell you otherwise. Stand up and fight the people that tell you to shut up just because you are an European, you don't owe nothing to noone.(Ill probably get banned for hate speech so goodbye, thats free speech for you)

.

immortal_flint wrote:

uk is leaving the eu
so fuck article 13 xD

Yeah you better start paying that porn tax or else you can't wank freely